Something in the Way by Jessica Hawkins

Someone else would be her first love. Some other man would be the first to cherish her. The first to ruin her. It couldn’t be me.

One of my favorite romance tropes? Love triangles. After that? Forbidden romance. Something in the Way gives it to you in spades. I don’t know what I was expecting when I started reading, but it certainly wasn’t the overwhelming emotions that ebbed and flowed through me throughout all 400+ pages.

By the end of this book, my heart had been broken, shattered, stepped on, crushed, and handed back to me- expecting to function.

Synopsis:

It was a hot summer day when I met him on the construction site next to my parents’ house. Under the sweat and dirt, Manning Sutter was as handsome as the sun was bright. He was older, darker, experienced. I wore a smiley-face t-shirt and had never even been kissed. Yet we saw something in each other that would link us in ways that couldn’t be broken…no matter how hard we tried.

I loved Manning before I knew the meaning of the word. I was too young, he said. I would wait. Through all the carefully-chosen words hiding what we knew to be true, through his struggle to keep me innocent, and through infinitely-starry nights–I would wait. But I’d learn that life isn’t always fair. That no matter how much you achieve, none of it matters if you suffer the heartbreak that comes with falling for someone you can never have. Because even though I saw Manning first, that didn’t matter. My older sister saw him next.

We meet Lake Kaplan in the summer of 1993, at 16 she is innocent, naive and yet intuitive in some ways that are beyond her years and experience. When she first meets Manning Sutter, 23, she feels something, but has no way to explain it, except that she doesn’t want to say goodbye.

The story takes us through the summer, we watch as Lake discovers what her feelings are, and becomes emboldened by them. We watch as Manning suffers from feeling so strongly for someone he shouldn’t. We watch as there is always… something in the way.

By the end there are lies and sacrifices made, secrets that could destroy, all of which had me clenching my already crushed heart even harder. A cliffhanger that is not a cliffhanger- more like a soul destroying moment that is a pivotal point in every characters life, affecting nearly ever relationship in the book.